Linkbait 27

Last week’s. I stupidly forgot to add half of my links to #26; here they are. No Tizen, that merits a separate article.

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Interesting PayPal initiative to do away with credit cards entirely in mobile shopping. You authorise payments with your phone number. A later article puts this in historical perspective.

The Register rants against Android’s completely lack of progress in HTML5. They’re right, of course: of all the myriad mobile OSs Android is the most anti-Web. Basically nothing is happening.
Don’t make the mistake of saying it’s Google that’s doing this: it’s the Android team. The Chrome team is doing what it can.

Michael Mace on why “Just wait” are the two most dangerous words in technology marketing. Current sinners include Nokia, HP, Microsoft, and RIM.

Another doomed Google anti-Web action: Native Client. Why the hell do we need yet another plugin?

David Storey gives a solid overview of what’s currently going on on the open web, and a summary of the components of the web stack.

Jonathan Stark feels that a Web App is not the same as an HTML App, and he has a point.

Scott Jenson makes a very persuasive argument that mobile apps must die. Soon there will be too many mobile apps, as all kinds of brands and public services hurry to get on to your phone. However, you need their apps (or rather, the data they contain) only for a few seconds or so. Thus it makes more sense to offer a web page, which is made for “just-in-time” interaction, only to be discarded a few seconds later. You don’t want to download a mobile app for such a use case.

Jonathan Snook reveals a truly great synthesis of his thoughts on organising CSS. Worth to be read in its entirety, even though it’s several pages long. Worth being bookmarked: you’ll often find yourself returning here.

Unbeknownst to me, there seems to be a petition (lang="nl") going on in the Netherlands to ask Google to become the fourth national operator. That’s a surprisingly interesting idea, and since I think at least some device/OS vendors will move downstack to the connection layer anyway, why not try it out over here, where we’ve got a lot of smartphone users in a small area and a government that’s interested in increasing competition among operators?

The Mac Observer calls it: Safari on Windows and Mac is a second-rate browser. Sluggish, weird interface, all kinds of minor bugs. When I did some desktop tests recently I decided that of the five desktop browsers I like Safari least.
The fundamental problem is that Apple is pretty bad at making software applications. Look no further than iTunes.
On the other hand, Safari on iOS is still easily the best mobile browser. Maybe Apple just shifted its browser focus. That would be in line with the overall strategy.

Andreas Constantinescu talks about how the web will make discovery kill distribution because the web is the only way of bypassing the app stores. I’ve supported this point of view for at least a year, so I obviously agree.
However, Andreas continues to argue that initiatives from the social networks, especially, will cause the new discovery/distribution system to become closed, and we won’t win anything. I doubt this point: although it’s certainly true that Facebook and Twitter can create nearly-closed APIs and apps that are dependent on them, and thus carve out a private chunk of web, this is nothing new. Countless companies have done that, and the web as a whole hasn’t suffered. It supported this use case from the beginning.
Finally, Andreas argues that the mobile web platform needs a leader. I fail to see why: although it’s true that the current state of the mobile web is confusing, to say the least, we have the tools to solve these problems. More importantly still: a good, new web initiative that gives both developers and consumers what they want can seize the lead and become the next de-facto standard. Thus, the web’s headlessness, far from deterring new competitors, is a very welcoming environment.